Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

I guess I would say there are two central charges you would make against this government. The first charge is that the government has had no time to solve the major economic problems facing the nation because it has been obsessed with working through a laundry list of issues that are important to the vested interests that put the government in its place. I mean the government is more interested in what is important to the CFMEU or the big super funds than it is in what matters to people, which is why it has failed on housing and inflation. The other central charge you'd have to make at this point in time is that the government has significant integrity issues. People that are sitting at the apex of this government have incurred integrity issues and trust issues because of the way they have chosen to conduct themselves in high, public office.

You only have to go back to 2022 and the election campaign to see that the promises made to the Australian people by this government were that it would be easier and cheaper under this government, and that has not been the case. You don't need a politician to tell you that.

Everyone knows that. But the point of consequence here is that the Treasurer, Mr Chalmers, has started to blame everyone for the woes that the government finds itself in: high inflation and low growth. We're in a pretty bad situation.

Instead of being honest and upfront about what the government can do—the government can run a fiscal policy or it can run an economic policy, which is going to help businesses, small businesses and families—he has taken aim at the major institutions that have nothing to do with the capacity of Mr Chalmers himself to do his job. Every day, you see him attacking the Reserve Bank or the Productivity Commission. The most recent salvo against the Reserve Bank was that it was smashing the economy, and the point Mr Chalmers was trying to make is that the Reserve Bank had interest rates too high. The reason the Reserve Bank has interest rates too high is that the government has not stopped spending since it won office.

If you look at the proportion of inflation that is in the economy today, a large proportion of that is because of public sector spending. The jobs figures that we see show that most employment growth now in Australia is happening in the public sector. More people are working for the government than ever before, and that is a rude shock to the average small-business person who gets out of bed every day and works hard. It's not fair.

The integrity issues that I mentioned before, which are now accumulating for the government, include the making of false claims to the Senate. This was aired in the newspapers on the weekend, where we found out that Mr Chalmers had failed to comply with an order for the production of documents because he filed a public interest immunity claim. In that claim, the Treasurer said that the disclosure of certain information in relation to the Cbus super fund would be contrary to the public interest because it would disclose commercial-in-confidence information.

But, because of the existence of freedom-of-information laws, we don't just rely on orders for the production of documents in the Senate. We also are able to access documents through FOI, and the information commissioner found the Treasurer had no case to cover up this file which he had received from Cbus. Last month, the information commissioner ordered that it be released. Last week, that file was released, and it revealed that there had been a secret lobbying campaign from the Cbus super fund to Mr Chalmers, not about anything commercial in confidence but about a special deal that the fund wanted so it could cover up the stamp duty costs in its member disclosures.

It seems very strange that the Treasurer would spend time and capital making false claims in a public interest immunity order, but it is perhaps not surprising, given the amount of integrity issues this government is accumulating alongside its failures to address the key economic issues of the day.